9/11 and Pearl Harbor

Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk: The Buck Stops Here. If someone had decided during his administration to bomb New York City off the face of the earth and Truman had not been able to stop it, he would have held himself personally responsible. He ran for office on the idea that he was the best man for the job, and he considered that to be a very high expectation indeed. He was a competent, responsible adult. That is: he was a very conservative, old fashioned adult.
Conspiracies are notoriously difficult to carry through successfully. Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the American people have always held our government partially responsible for that tragedy. We had intercepted the information; we simply did not think bombing our fleet out of the water was the most likely thing the Japanese would do. It seemed unlikely. Our government was mistaken, and many Americans have consistently considered that mistake deadly and inexcusable, but no has ever had the gall to put forward the theory that the devilish Japanese were so innately evil and superior that our ability to govern ourselves according to our own constitution was in question. We honored responsible adults in those days and did what we needed to do and came home and raised our families as best we could. We considered caring for our children and each other what adults did, even if the commitment sometimes made us very unhappy for long periods. People stayed married for the children.
Our Beloved Leader and his backers have never themselves taken responsibility for the horror of their own incompetence in terms of the the surreal fact that commercial airliners flew out of Boston carrying women and children as well men and into the World Trade Center in New York City. He has snatched citizens off the streets of major cities , denied Americans the basic right of Habeas Corpus, and whipped the citizens of this comparatively open society into a frenzy of paranoia without admitting that the success of that loony plot was unlikely in the extreme and an incredible illustration of his administration's utter incompetence. People look to fascism to protect themselves with a strong competent leader when they feel themselves under uncontrollable and incomprehensible threat. We now have a proto fascist government, and I am no alarmist. I never think a successful disaster is the result of a conspiracy. Conspiracies mostly just fail; they are too complex. The best explanation of any phenomenon is usually the simplest that covers all elements of the question; that is never a conspiracy unless the government is run by irresponsible, paranoid proto fascists. There you are.